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Choosing a domain name you will not regret

What it costs 6 min read

How to pick a domain name that survives a phone call, a van door and the day you start working two towns over, and what to skip at checkout.

You are about to buy a domain name and the search box is telling you the obvious one is taken. An hour later you have thirty tabs open, none of them feel right, and the good ones all want you to add a hyphen or a word you would never say out loud.

This is a decision you make once and live with for a decade, which makes it feel heavier than it is. Most of the weight comes off once you know what the name actually has to do.

Say it out loud before you type it

A domain name is said far more often than it is read, over a bad connection, from a ladder, to somebody writing it on the back of a receipt.

Test any name you are considering by saying this sentence to another person: "It is my name, then dot com." If they have to ask how it is spelled, the name is costing you something every time you give it out. If you have to say "with a K" or "no space" or "the number two", you will be saying that for years.

Short helps for the same reason. A long name gets truncated on a van door, wraps badly on an invoice, and takes three attempts on the phone.

Your own business name is usually the answer

The temptation is to buy a name made of the words people search for, something like the trade and the town joined together. It reads like a shortcut.

It is not much of one. Search engines stopped treating the words in a domain as proof of anything a long time ago, and nobody outside those companies can tell you what your ranking will be. What a keyword domain reliably does is make you sound like a directory rather than a business, interchangeable with the four other names built the same way.

Your business name is what is on your invoices, your truck, your shirts and the reviews people leave. Matching the domain to it means every place your name appears points at the same address.

The town in it, and the day you outgrow it

Putting Castle Rock in the name is useful. It tells a stranger you are near enough to come, which is most of what they want to know.

It also has a cost, and it arrives later. The day you take regular work in Parker or Monument, the name argues with you. Some owners never mind. Others end up running two sites, or wishing they could change it.

The middle path is to think about how far you would drive on a good week in three years' time. If the honest answer is your own town and the roads out of it, put the town in. If you already turn down work only because you are busy and not because of distance, leave it out and let the pages say where you work instead.

Hyphens, numbers and clever spellings

All three arrive the same way. The name you wanted was taken, and the search box offered you a version of it.

A hyphen is invisible in speech. You will spend the next ten years saying "with a dash in the middle", and half the people who call you will have already landed on the version without it, which belongs to somebody else. A number is worse, because you have to say whether it is spelled out. A clever spelling with a missing letter or an extra one is a private joke that costs you traffic every day.

If the only version available needs one of the three, the name is taken. Pick a different name rather than a damaged version of that one.

Dot com, and when another ending is fine

Dot com is still what people type when they are guessing and what they assume when they hear a name. That is the whole argument for it, and it is a good one.

The other endings work when the name is distinctive enough that nobody is guessing. Given a choice between a strong name on a different ending and a mangled version of the one you wanted on dot com, take the strong name. What you should not do is take a name an existing business already uses on another ending, because you will spend years receiving each other's phone calls.

Some endings will not let you keep your personal details private, so if you work from home, check that before you buy rather than after.

Make sure it is not already somebody's

A name being available to register does not mean it is free to use. Another business may hold the name itself, and that is a different question from whether the web address is unclaimed.

Do the cheap checks before you pay. Search the name in quotes and see who comes up. Check your state's business registry. Search the federal trademark database, which is free to look at. If a company in your trade is already using that name anywhere near you, choose something else. This is not legal advice, and if anything you find looks close, an hour of a lawyer's time now costs less than a rebrand later.

Buy it in your own name, and skip most of the extras

Register the domain yourself, on an account in your own name, with your own card and an email address you actually read. If somebody else registers it for you, it is theirs, and every year afterwards it becomes more expensive to unpick.

Checkout will try to add things: bundles, page builders, marketing trials, security add-ons with alarming names. You need the domain and, in most cases, nothing else on that page. Two settings are worth doing while you are there, and both are free: turn auto-renew on, and make sure the contact address on the account does not end in the domain you are buying, because if the name ever lapses those warning emails go nowhere.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

Should I put my town or my trade in the domain name

Put the town in if your work stays local and you want it that way. The trade is usually better handled by the words on the page than by the address.

Does the domain name affect where I rank on Google

Not in the way the sellers of keyword domains imply. Nobody outside Google can promise you a position, and a name made of search terms has not been a shortcut for years.

The name I want is taken. Should I add a word

A real word can work, such as your last name or the town. A hyphen, a number or a dropped letter cannot, because you will be explaining it forever.

Can I change my domain name later

Yes, and it is more work than it sounds. Every printed thing and every listing points at the old one, and you have to keep the old name running for a long time to catch people.

Should I buy the misspellings and the other endings too

Only if a misspelling is genuinely likely or a competitor sitting on it would confuse customers. Buying a shelf of names to feel safe is money spent on nothing.

Who should the domain be registered to

You, personally or as the business. Not your web designer, not your nephew, not the marketing company. It is the one asset in this whole setup that everything else depends on.

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